LOS ANGELES—Ingrid Calame creates abstract drawings and paintings that combine documentation of messy remains of human activity and explorations of scientific, religious, and economic institutions or places. For “Constellations,” an exhibition on view at New York’s James Cohan Gallery through October 13, she overlapped tracings from the concrete bed of the Los Angeles River with, in one series, concentric circular markings from the building that houses the Clark Telescope in Flagstaff, Arizona, and in another series, reproductions of tire tracks left on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. (Her work at the speedway was commissioned by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where “Ingrid Calame: Traces of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway” opens in November.) The results, which she calls “Secular Responses,” can either be intricate, maplike colored-pencil drawings on Mylar, or high-key color abstractions in enamel paint on aluminum.

Calame’s studio is in an industrial building in Echo Park, Los Angeles. She singled out the 20-by-40-foot floor of the main space, where she does the large-scale works based on her on-site tracings, as the studio’s key component.

“My floor was conceived as a wall-to-wall tabletop—with as little texture as possible—so that I can make my drawings on it. My husband, Shelby Roberts, made it from four-by-eight sheets of MDX particleboard that are sprung, bunged, and varnished. It is covered with white butcher paper 99 percent of the time. The paper is stretched and taped so there are no wrinkles, which is a labor-intensive process that we do monthly. Although my floor routines might appear fetishized, they are essential to my process. We walk in stocking feet or on paths of brown paper around the Mylar drawings and tracings lying on the floor. On the rare occasions that the floor is revealed I feel like I am in a gallery instead of a laboratory!”